It's Not the End of the WorldOh, Wait, It Is
by AlexG
Summary: The most ambitious crossover story ever! What do you do when it’s your job to make sure that all of existence everyplace stays intact, but not only is it too big a task for one, but it’s time for you to go on break? Why, assemble the best group of rag-tag


Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Come one, come all, to witness the most ambitious crossover story ever to be attempted anytime anyplace ever! What do you do when it's your job to make sure that all of existence everyplace stays intact, but not only is it too big a task for one, but it's time for you to go on break? Why, assemble the best group of rag-tag people who've ever mucked through science fiction, of course! This story brings together the most fascinating of characters, from the far reaches of space and time, and even from our own little planet.

Disclaimers (There are quite a lot of these, so you might want to go grab yourself a cheese sandwich while I go through them all):

-I do not own the Star Trek characters Q, Jean-Luc Picard, William Riker, Deanna Troi, Geordi LaForge, Beverly Crusher, Worf, Data, Wesley Crusher, or Reginald Barclay.

-I do not own the Red Dwarf characters David Lister, Arnold Rimmer, Kryten, Cat, or Holly

-I do not own the Strange Days at Blake Holsey High characters Josie Trent, Lucas Marshall, or Professor Zachary

-I do not own the _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ characters Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, or Fenchurch

-I do not own the ships _Red Dwarf, Starbug, Enterprise-E, _or _Heart of Gold_

-I do not own the words Frood, Hoopy, or Sass as made up and/or used by Douglass Adams

-I do not own the word "Macrocosm" or, indeed, any of the other words in the English language except, perhaps, gurflicklis, which is a fake word between just you and me. Still, that won't stop me using it from time to time.

-I DO own the character of Pontilus; he sprang whole from my brain. That doesn't prevent him, of course, from liking to think of himself as generally his own man and doing whatever the hell he likes, so no getting really ticked off at me on his account.

Results falsified to create hype and excitement

I heard that someplace. I don't remember where, but I don't own it either

So, without further ado, (I'd say we've had enough, haven't you?) I present, (I mean, after all that blathering on we should get going) for your reading entertainment, (You don't think I go on too long, do you?) pleasure, (I like to think people would tell me if I do) and all around joy, (I'm sorry, it appears someone has shot me in the back. I'll be slumped out here on the floor if anyone needs me, 'k?), the wonderful new story:

**IT'S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD… OH, WAIT, YES IT IS**

_This is bad, _Pontilus thought. He was slowly starting to realize that he thought that a lot. He hadn't always thought it, but now things were really starting to look grim. Indeed, they had passed "grim" quite a long time ago. Grim didn't begin to describe it. No, rather things had come and gone by "grim", flew past "awful" at twice the speed limit, and were now in the process of making a crash landing at "nearly hopeless". There now seemed to be nary a day when some near-catastrophe didn't occur. The brink was quickly approaching and there was little time left to turn around. And all this considered, it had put Pontilus under rather a lot of stress and placed him in sort of a bad mood.

Pontilus had what some would call a hard job. Those who would call it a hard job are, of course, a perfect example of that kind of people who go around making everything seem cut and dried when it's really more complex than anything else out there. You know the type… the ones who say thing like, "Oh, come on, it can't be that hard to get here on time," or, "To me, it looks simple. All we have to do is turn the universe inside out," and, "I refuse to believe that politics are a complex matter." Pontilus would have been upset with those kind of people, but he didn't have the time ever because his job was to make sure the Macrocosm didn't have any problems. And for a few millennia it'd been a pretty simple task. But then there started to be problems. All the different universes out there were starting to be an enormous drain and, as such, the entirety of everything was beginning to come apart. In most circles worth mentioning, that was considered a bad thing. The circles that didn't consider it a bad thing were mainly made up of apocalypse-predicting monks and hobos, and as was said before they aren't worth mentioning in this context.

When the great Macrocosm had been set up, it hadn't ever been thought that it would work quite this way. Of course, it hadn't exactly been planned out to the letter. Truth telling, it was actually set up by one man who'd been up too late one night, nursing a bottle of scotch, who had scribbled some plans down on a napkin before his liver gave out. The coroner found it on him and thought it was a pretty good way to run an entirety of existence, so he'd taken it to his local government. They had, in turn, implemented the system; never quite knowing what would happen in much the same way as some men plug numerous electrical lights into one socket and then cower behind an upturned coffee table while they are activated around the December months, they crossed their fingers and held their breath. Everything seemed to work out well until a violent quake shook them all to their very souls. The universe folded in on itself, imploded, then exploded. Then something really strange happened, which was that there was another universe hanging out right next to the first, where it was discovered that everyone had apparently died from holding their breaths too long. This was of course very odd and considered impossible, but it seemed to have happened. And thus was the theory of bifurcation of the universe not only born, but proven real.

Now, though, the great Macrocosm was starting to have trouble. Big trouble. And Pontilus wasn't going to be able to sort it out on his own. There were two reasons for this:

He was unable to sort out all the idiosyncrasies of the Macrocosm from his office, which he couldn't leave without something exploding, and

It was time for his coffee break in about seven minutes, anyway, and he wasn't missing it for anything. He hadn't had a break in four billion years, and he was looking forward to the six millennia he had coming to him.

_That's it,_ he thought. _There's nothing else to do. Time to start calling in the troops._

The "troops" weren't exactly troops at all. In fact, they were hardly worthy to do much of anything. They weren't the kind of people that were useful for deep thoughts or taking care of things with any great enthusiasm, but they seemed to have a knack for making things come out well and that was what Pontilus was really interested in. With these things in mind he pointed his sensing equipment at universe 66914-22315 and its bifurcations, ready to start the transfer.

Far in the outer reaches universe 66914-22315.398776, a small craft zoomed through space. Its occupants were not exactly what first pops into mind when one thinks about intergalactic heroes. The image one mostly gets is that of chiseled, muscular people in tight fitting yet somehow skimpy garments running around deep space in a souped-up ship battling evil. The group of entities one is less likely to imagine is a mechanoid, a deranged computer, the last human being alive and a hologram simulation of his dead bunkmate. Nonetheless, they were the first to be chosen. Actually all the choosing happened simultaneously, but there are some who believe that a linear system of storytelling is more dramatic and easier to follow, so we shall employ that one.

On this particular day, the ship was flying back from a mining expedition that had taken place on one of the asteroids in the system. One of the members of the group was being quite vociferous in his obvious and not entirely unfounded anger at something that had happened while there.

"Look, Rimmer, I'm telling you it was an _accident_!" said Dave Lister, the human, to Arnold Rimmer, the hologram. He drew out each syllable of the word "accident" as if it were a word unto itself, which it wasn't, but that didn't seem to be stopping him.

"Lister, you must think me a simple-minded fool to believe such a story," Rimmer replied. "Are you honestly trying to make me believe that you turned the crawler on totally by mistake?"

"Yeah."

"And that it pursued me, by itself, until I was cornered with no alternative but to dive into the cooling pool and swim to the other side?"

"Yeah."

"And then I'm sure it was quite by mistake that the cargo door in the floor on the other side opened directly beneath me not two seconds after I got out from the water."

"It does sound sort of dodgy when you say it that way, Rimmer."

"If I may say so, sir," the mechanoid Kryten spoke up for the first time, "can you not simply be grateful to be safe?"

"Safe, you say? Safe? I spent three hours locked in a crate until you came and loaded me into _Starbug_."

"But sir, you escaped all bodily harm."

"Only barely. I would have done better to crawl into a garbage bag and wait to be put into the crushers than stick around with all of you."

At that point three things happened at once. The first was that _Starbug _reached its destination, the Jupiter Mining Corporation Vessel _Red Dwarf_. The second was that Holly, the ship's computer, appeared on the screen. She promptly announced that they'd reached their destination and that she was trying to get the landing doors open. The final thing was that a space vortex opened up behind the ship, but nobody noticed because they were preoccupied by the way the door to the hangar was locked up tight.

"Hang on a moment," Holly said, "I'm getting an automated message. It's from the Cat."

"Put it on," Rimmer said.

The Cat appeared on the screen. "Hi, buddies!" he said. "Listen, I know I was supposed to hang around and let you all in when you returned, but do realize how boring it is? It's nauseatingly dull! So, anyway, I went ahead and started organizing all my suits by season and then alphabetically by color and occasion. I should be done in, oh, about a week or so. Later, fellas!" The Cat waved and the recording ended.

"Oh, dear," Holly said.

"You can say that again!" Rimmer yelled. "How are we going to eat? Where are we going to sleep? We'll die out here waiting for the Cat!"

"We have been gone over a week, sir. It's possible he might be just finishing with his task. I suggest we wait and see what happens."

"Oh, dear," Holly said again.

"I'm with Holly on this one," Rimmer said. "We can't sit out here forever."

"It's not about that at all," Holly said.

"Then what is it about?" Lister asked.

_Starbug _shook violently and started to spin. Soon it was tumbling end over end into a large white vortex in space. The four watched in terror as it quickly engulfed their views. "That," Holly said, and then the ship vanished into thin air… er, vacuum.

A few seconds later, the docking bay opened. "Hi, fellas!" said a transmission, but it was broadcasting to nothing. "Fellas? Monkey? Goalpost head? Somethin' must have happened to them!" There was a long silence, then, "I guess I better do my socks next!"

The members waiting to be gathered up from universe 66914-22315.274951 were not nearly so far away. They were quite happily hanging out on their little blue-green planet as it swung idly around the sun. On this planet was an old boarding school, and inside it, two students rushed to a class. They scurried down the hall sideways, carrying a large apparatus between them.

Josie Trent, a short girl with red hair, ran along side Lucas Randall, who didn't have red hair and wasn't all that short. In fact, there is really no reason to compare them further, except to say that they had two very real things in common. The first was that they were both exceptionally late, and the second was that they were both about to stumble on to something weirder than they were used to, which was quite exceptional because a lot of weird things tended to happen there anyway.

"Thanks for waiting with me, Lucas," Josie said. "I'm really sorry it took so long."

"It's alright, it's alright. Let's just pick up the pace!"

"I mean, I really thought I'd be able to have the project done."

'There was no way you could have planned on the lightbulb burning out."

"Yeah, I know." She was silent for a moment, then said, "It was an interesting idea, though… lighting a lightbulb with the heat the laptop produced. If we could use waste energy…"

"Josie… save it for the presentation."

At the same time, Professor Noel Zachary was attempting to lead his class through the concept of convection currents in the air. Unfortunately, he was somewhat sidetracked by the huge swirling vortex that had opened up behind him, and was sucking in papers, lab equipment, and even small animals. It was also trying to exact that same pressure on him, but he was fighting it. He made his way towards the door and was about to start evacuating his class when it opened. Josie and Lucas came rushing into the room but, caught by surprise by the pulling of the vortex, continued at top speed until they crashed into Zachary. The entire sprawling mass of three people went flying into the thing, which promptly sealed itself.

"So, do we get to leave now?" Someone asked.

(Author's Note: Next chapter, we get the rest of the crew assembled and get the story going!)


End file.
